Alex Dobrenko

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very cool new thing with the mac: hookmark, which is an app that allows you to link to anything on your computer as though it was a URL. So If i’m in Tana, I can link to a document I’m working on. Bam wam this is great.  

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Easily the best named songs on an album i’ve ever seen

handed it in

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515am time to start writing again. Need to hand in a version of the new essay today. Stressed. I always get so stressed when writing these fucking essays. Like, it narrows my scope of the world SO much I forget about everything else. Hyperfocus? Idk but its scary. 

 

628am - after mostly being on ‘sit while wilder falls asleep’ duty and spending my free time working on some abasolutely useless bullshtt, I am now here sitting next to Wilder as he watches tV and still the essay has not begun! 

 idk where this went but I handed this in at around 1230pm!!!

 

Now, time to dance. 

 

Actually I didn’t dance I sorta fell apart but who cares

some lil passages i've been writing

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“happiness is a loaded gun” he thought to himself, wondering right away whether it was an original thought or a song he’d heard somewhere. This was the modern question: is this mine or is this someone else’s? 

It was someone else’s, he googled, but also not what he was thinking of which was the beatles’ happiness is a warm gun. 

But some other band - Hybrid Children - had beat him to the 'loaded gun’ alt by 2007 back when he was a freshman in college. What the hell was he supposed to do with this information? 

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the cuteness fades but the responsibility lingers, grows stronger actually. parenting 101. 

 

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these came after reading a couple more chapter’s in Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me. i love when a book makes me write and think a different way. 

a log of time poorly spent, #3030

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I have to rewrite a big essay today for WORK. Will soon disclose what work this is not that anyone cares also no one knows about this blog haha. 

 

BUT When I am faced with such a thing, I find myself…overwhelmed? Like the scope of the task make it hard for me to envision completing. So I figured I’d sorta…log it here and see what happens. 

 

Jennifer Egan's Look At Me

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I can’t stop reading Jennfier Egan’s books they’re so fucking good. In the middle of “Look At Me” and i read this:

“I leaned close to Paul Shepherd. This was always interesting: the moment when the surface first peeled away and what was underneath—desire, perversion, whatever it might be—moved into the light. The truth. I wanted to see it. Everyone was a liar, blah-blahing their way through life, pretending to be good and constant, to have and to hold and all that. Everyone was a politician, wearing a pious face until the last possible moment when the press unearthed a taste for child amputees or a beheaded mistress chained to a radiator. And I’d been pious, too, at first—I’d believed my own act until the pressure of sustaining it became too much. Since then, I’d sought out the opposite: I wanted to be the child amputee or the mistress, to make my domain the dark corners where I could see the things people took such pains to hide from everyone else.”

 

I love this. It’s an opinion that i’ve never had exactly but have had ones similar, or nearby, but maybe never took them as far? never gave myself permission to or maybe never wanted to? So to put an opinion like that into a character! That’s really fucking cool. 

Egan’s stuff reminds of me Lorrie Moore in the best way possible. Moore is prob one of my top 5 writers. Her, Vonnegut, Egan probably. who else idk. 

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Like, there’s just something about this line - 

“You look tired,” he said, and the two halves of him fused in a moment of humanity. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, yet I felt relieved.”

- the idea of the two halves of him fused in a moment of humanity. Like, humanity comes from the blending of the shadow and the face. The heel and the face. Everything connects to wrestling if you want it to...

But there’s something so beautiful about that idea, and the way she expressed it so economically and through the description of a person in space and time as seen by the narrator. A++++

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xmas eve. as a jew it is strange to be a dad of a family that is so into christmas but i think I like it? tbd but I think I do? its complicated but I think a lot of that has to do with me always feeling like i’m not really getting enough stuff lol.

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the hype of AI is so fucking strong, it feels like a big ol fomo mountain of everyone going “omg omg this is so crazy its so cool’ that I feel stupid not participating!

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A list of tiny companies and people doing cool shit on the internet

1. Good Enough 

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Am writing these now in MarsEdit and enjoying that flow. Also enjoying the fact that no one actually knows this exists yet. Maybe I’ll keep it that way? 

mirror mirror on the screen

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thinking about mirrors as that which we look into for a distorted view of self.

if that’s true, what is there more mirror-like than our screens? We look into a mirror like…5-15 min a day? maybe 30?

We stare into screens for 6+ hours.

And inside them we see other things, but we really see ourselves. I mean, you could make this argument for anything, we stare at it and see just ourselves, but the screen - and TV specifically - feels interesting…

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this looks cool - excited for it next year yes www.metalabel.com/canvas

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been wanting a place to have a tiny lil blog and maybe this is it?